Building reputation and brand loyalty

How a company handles customer complains has a significant impact on its reputation and brand loyalty. Harnessing the feedback customers give your company and acting on it will keep valued customers coming back for more.

Companies must strive to handle customer dissatisfaction in an efficient and satisfactory manner in order to continue to grow and enhance its reputation.

All departments of a company must collaborate in the process of complaint resolution to increase the quality of outcome, says Andrew Meads, Customer Service Director, Europe and Global DMTR, Elizabeth Arden.

Meads will be a speaker at the marcus evans Complaint Handling Strategies for Effective Client Recovery Conferencetaking place in London on 8-10 June.

“One of the biggest challenges is getting to root causes of complaints. Quite often the customer is like a baton being handed along in a relay race. Lots of people within an organisation will touch the customer during that process and very often it’s not one department’s sole responsibility to deal with it.

“Very often what you find when you get through to the root causes is the fact that there is a systemic process issue. You will only resolve those issues by including every area of your business that touches that particular customer process. For me it is critical for two reasons: Resolution – understanding what went wrong and how you redress that with the customer. The longer term focus is on prevention. The solution to systemic problems must be found with the help of other departments with a clear understanding of what must change going forward.”

A well designed complaint management system plays a crucial role in helping to engender brand loyalty, Meads adds.

“One of the main focuses across the industry today is ease of doing business. The questions is how easy is it to do business with you as an organisation? When you bring complaint into that equation there’s a huge opportunity for companies. Research shows that being able to resolve a particular issue and convince the customer – having that opportunity to deal with that complaint in an extremely easy but effective way is a real tool for engendering going forward.

“That’s what people will talk about and it can be very positive. If a customer has a complaint you need to make it as easy as possible for that person to raise that complaint and resolve it in a way that will exceed their expectations.A good system for managing complaints and ensuring the appropriate areas are involved and that you get to the root cause and stop it happening again.”

The marcus evans Complaint Handling Strategies for Effective Client Recovery Conference will take place in London on 8-10 June.